5 Essential Ingredients For a Successful Training Session

A few weeks ago, we were fortunate enough to meet with Natacha de Saint Vincent, President of the Francis Lefebvre Formation, and one of the leaders in the field of professionnal training. After a conference she gave about collaboration during training sessions, we discussed different theories, one of which particularly caught our attention; the 5 essential ingredients for successful training.

Would you like to find out this secret recipe? Let’s go over it together.

10 minute rule

In order to keep your audience’s attention, Natacha recommends changing teaching techniques every 10 minutes. After this delay, she says attention levels can drop by as much as 80%.

But what are these teaching methods? She mentioned 3:

The demonstration method, also called the traditional learning method, means the teacher explains a subject while the audience listens.

The Heuristic method, where the audience is able to develop and experiment with their own theories, e.g.: brainstorming

Application: the audience use their newly acquired theoretical knowledge by applying it in practical cases.

To stimulate interaction and collaboration, Natacha de Saint Vincent alternates between more traditional methods, which involve a lot of theoretical concepts and explanations, and modern techniques, which include brainstorming and collaboration, and for which she relies on a helpful tool named Wooclap. By respecting this rule, she manages to hold her audience’s attention and improve their retention.

2. Repeat the information

To make sure vital information is retained, repetition is key. Concepts that are mentioned once tend to be easily forgotten, while revisiting the important parts helps your audience pay more attention to them.

3. Use visuals

Not all visual aids have the same impact on attention. Graphs have been shown to be the most stimulating, because they give the audience a clear and direct representation of the information.

4. Limit information

Studies have shown that the amount of information that can be stored in people’s short-term memory is limited and dependent on the individual. Teachers should keep that in mind when designing their presentation and limit the information displayed on screen.

5. Add emotion through intonation

Information associated with emotion will be better remembered than that same information delivered in a neutral way. To that end, Mrs de Saint Vincent turned to Wooclap to bring her presentation to life, and the resulting enthusiasm and excitement helped her audience take the information home, rather than leave it at the conference.